Little touches make Christmas special for sailors, Marines

Hull maintenance technician Tamika Kitchen, aboard the USS Green Bay, speaks to a reporter on the phone Monday for this article. Kitchen packed an artificial tree when she deployed and her shipmates have decorated it with homemade ornaments. Courtesy photo

Hull maintenance technician Tamika Kitchen, aboard the USS Green Bay, speaks to a reporter on the phone Monday for this article. Kitchen packed an artificial tree when she deployed and her shipmates have decorated it with homemade ornaments. Courtesy photo

On a bobbing ship more than 8,000 miles from home, a slice of Americana — pumpkin, apple or in this case, pecan — can make the difference on Christmas.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that sailor Charmaine Yutuc, 19, won the pie-making contest aboard the amphibious ship Green Bay this week. It’s her first deployment. First Christmas away from home.

“At home, we have ice sculptures downtown. We’d have a special Christmas breakfast,” Yutuc, a ship’s cook who hails from Alaska, said in a phone interview from the Arabian Sea. “Here, you don’t have any of that — no snow, no Rudolph, no Santa. Just water.”

More than 4,000 sailors and Marines from San Diego County are deployed during the holidays with the Peleliu amphibious ready group. The three-ship team, which also includes the Rushmore, left San Diego Bay in September and is scheduled to return in April.

The group’s itinerary means that Halloween and Thanksgiving were spent away from home, and the story’s the same for Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day.

Each crew member gets to make a phone call to loved ones on Christmas — up to 10 minutes of homespun love over the telephone line. Then it’s back to work, back to training exercises, back to keeping the watch.

This is sailor Tamika Kitchen’s second Christmas at sea, and she’s got it figured out. You plan in advance. A six-foot artificial Tannenbaum was stowed away with her gear when the Green Bay began its deployment.

Kitchen, a 36-year-old hull technician from Boston, supplied her shop with Christmas spirit. Her teammates fashioned ornaments out of soda cans.

Kitchen also participated in the ship’s holiday door-decorating contest. (Third place. Not too shabby on the vessel, which is carrying about 1,000 people.)

“Christmas on the ship is what you make of it,” she said. “You have ... people around you who go off of what you feel. You can make the best of it.”

If she were at home, she would help one of her aunts prepare Christmas dinner. Kitchen’s job is usually the turkey, which she cooks on the grill.

“The home-cooked meal — that would be the best part,” Kitchen said.

Today, the Green Bay will serve turkey with dressing, honey-glazed ham, mashed potatoes and gravy. The ship recently received a shipment of ingredients for the special occasion.

Vice Adm. John Miller, commander of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, will fly aboard the ship to preside over the feast. The festivities are set to start at 3 p.m. and last for hours, so that sailors can enjoy a rare leisurely meal.

Not home-cooked, exactly, but the 19-year-old Yutuc will be one of the cooks at the ship’s hulking stoves. Her winning creation, a pecan pie cheesecake she invented with a Marine onboard, will be baked in bulk for the holiday meal.

“On Christmas Day, I’ll be in the kitchen,” Yutuc said. “But at least we’ll be making some people happy.”

On this deployment, the Peleliu amphibious ready group includes troops from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit at Camp Pendleton and Miramar Marine Corps Air Station. Those Marines are getting a few days off over Christmas Eve after having participated in training exercises with forces from Timor Leste and Kuwait during the past few months.

They won’t say where, for the purpose of security. But the port is a place where the Marines can enjoy a restaurant meal — probably a hamburger instead of a turkey dinner. Many are taking the opportunity to sleep in a real hotel bed, not a bunk, for the night.

“Christmas away from home, it’s a little bit tough. Christmas is my favorite holiday of all time,” said Cpl. John Robbart III, a Camp Pendleton Marine who attended San Diego High School.

At home, he would have opened one gift on Christmas Eve with his wife, Elizabeth. The rest would be unwrapped on Christmas morning.

This year, his wife sent chocolates to the ship.

“Marines, we form a brotherhood that’s different from friends you make in high school. We endure tough situations together,” Robbart, 22, said in a telephone interview. “It’s tough being away from home, but I’ve got my brothers and sisters on ship.”